Stellar Blade might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but when all the staff get a PS5 Pro and $3.4k as an end of year bonus after a year full of layoffs, you can’t help but cut it a bit of slack

Sure, Stellar Blade isn’t to everyone’s tastes, but the entire staff got a cash bonus alongside a PS5 Pro, which is pretty nice really.

Depending on who you ask, Stellar Blade is either a game not even worth acknowledging, the most important game ever made, or just quite good, honestly. The conversation around it has mostly just been annoying, especially in a year that’s been so rough on the games industry, so, how about some nice news out of developer Shift Up! As spotted by VGC, a Shift Up representative recently spoke with South Korean outlet Naver, where it was shared that all of the roughly 300 employees at the studio had been gifted a PS5 Pro – that bloody expensive console people have already stopped talking about – and that they’ll also be getting a bonus of 5 million won (which is about $3400).

According to the representative, the intention behind the bonuses was to encourage existing talent at the company. Considering how many layoffs took place last year (it’s estimated to be more than 14,000), to hear that a company actually wants to retain and even reward its staff is encouraging – let’s just hope that the staff’s salaries are healthy enough without the bonuses too.

Initial sales of Stellar Blade were humble compared to other big Sony titles, estimated to be around one million, but for a new IP it’s a healthy start, and with a PC release coming this year and an expectation from Shift Up that it’ll sell even better there, I’m sure the developer isn’t all that worried. The only concern it might have is a lawsuit that was filed against it and Sony last September over the user of the game’s name, Stellar Blade, as a film company, Stellarblade, has alleged that the use of the name is damaging business and infringing on the trademark.